by Tad Williams
As she sat wishing she could take off her wet cloak to celebrate being out of the rain, another group of costumed celebrants banged in through the door, shaking water from their finery and calling for beer. One of the loudest wore a mask shaped like a red-tongued hound. As he thumped his fist on a table, his right eye lit on Miriamele for a moment and seemed to pause. She felt a rush of fear, suddenly remembering another hound mask, and flaming arrows slashing through the forest shadows. But this dog quickly turned back to his fellows, making a jest and throwing his head back in laughter, his cloth ears swinging.
Miriamele pushed her hand against her chest as if to slow down her speeding heart.
I must keep this hood on, she told herself. It’s a festival night, so who will look twice? Better that than someone recognizing my face—however unlikely tha tmight seem.
Cadrach was gone a surprisingly long time. Miriamele was just starting to feel restive, wondering if she should go and look for him, when here turned with ajar of ale in each hand. A half-loaf of bread and an end of cheese were prisoned between the jars.
“A man could die of thirst a-waiting for beer, tonight,” the monk said. Miriamele ate greedily, then took a long swallow of the ale, which was bitter and dark in her mouth. The rest of the jar she left for Cadrach, who did not protest.
When the last crumbs were licked from her fingers and she was pondering whether she was hungry enough to eat a pigeon pie, a shadow fell across the bench she and the monk shared.
The raw-boned face of Death stared down at them from a black cowl.
Miriamele gasped and Cadrach sputtered ale on his gray robe, but the stranger in the skull mask did not move.
“A very pretty joke, friend,” Cadrach said angrily, “and merry mid-summer to you, too.” He swiped at the front of his garments.
The mouth did not move. The flat, unexcited voice issued from behind the bared teeth. “You come with me.”
Miriamele felt the skin on the back of her neck crawl. Her recently-consumed meal felt very heavy in her stomach.
Cadrach squinted. She could see tension in his neck and fingers. “And who might you be, mummer? Were you truly Brother Death, I would expect you clad in finer clothing.” The monk pointed a slightly trembling finger at the tattered black cloak the figure wore.
“Stand up and come with me,” the apparition said. “I have a knife. If you shout, things will be very bad for you.”
Brother Cadrach looked at Miriamele and grimaced. They rose, the princess on wobbly knees. Death gestured for them to walk ahead, through the press of tavern guests.
Miriamele was entertaining disconnected thoughts of making a bolt for freedom when two other figures slipped discreetly out of the crowd near the doorway. One wore a blue mask and the stylized garb of a sailor; the other was dressed as a rustic peasant in an oversized hat. The somber eyes of the newcomers belied their gaudy costumes.
With the sailor and peasant on either side, Cadrach and Miriamele followed black-cloaked Death out into the street. Before they had gone three dozen paces, the little caravan turned into an alley and down a flight of stairs to the next street below. Miriamele slipped for a moment on one of the rain-washed stone steps and felt a thrill of horror as her skull-faced captor reached out a hand to steady her. The touch was fleeting and she could not draw away without falling down, so she suffered it silently. A moment later they were off the stairway, then quickly into another alley-way, up a ramp, and around a corner.
Even with the faint moon overhead and the cries of late revelers echoing from the tavern above and the harbor district below, Miriamele quickly lost any sense of where she was. They traveled down tiny back streets like a string of skulking cats, ducking in and out of hidden courtyards and vine-shrouded walkways. From time to time they heard the murmur of voices from a darkened house, and once the sound of a woman crying.
At last they reached an arched gateway in a tall stone wall. Death produced a key from his pocket and opened the lock. They stepped through into an overgrown courtyard roofed with leaning willow trees, from whose trailing branches rainwater dripped patiently onto the cracked stone cobbles. The leader turned to the others, gestured briefly with his key, then indicated that Miriamele and Cadrach should walk ahead of him toward a shadowed doorway.
“We have come with you so far, man,” the monk said, whispering as if he, too, were a conspirator. “But there is no benefit to us in walking into an ambush. Why should we not fight you here and die beneath open sky, if we must be dying?”
Death leaned forward without a word. Cadrach started back, but the skull-masked man only leaned past him and knocked on the door with black-gloved knuckles, then pushed it inward. It swung open silently on oiled hinges.
A dim, warm light burned inside the portal. Miriamele stepped past the monk and through the doorway. Cadrach followed a moment later, muttering to himself. Skull-face came last of all and pushed the door shut behind him.
It was a small sitting room, lit only by a fire in the grate and one candle burning in a dish beside a decanter of wine on the table top. The walls were covered with heavy velvet tapestries, their designs distinguishable in the firelight only as swirls of color. Behind the table, in a high backed chair, sat a figure fully as strange as any of their escorts: a tall man in a russet-brown cloak, wearing the sharp-featured mask of a fox. The fox leaned forward, indicating two chairs with a graceful sweep of his velvet-gloved fingers.
“Sit down.” His voice was thin but melodious, “Sit down. Princess Miriamele. I would rise, but my crippled legs do not permit it.”
“This is madness,” Cadrach blustered, but kept an eye on the skull-faced specter at his shoulder. “You have made a mistake, sir—this is a boy you address, my acolyte…”
“Please.” The fox gestured amiably for silence. “It is time to doff our masks. Is that not how Midsummer Night always ends?”
He lifted the fox face away, revealing a shock of white hair and a face seamed with age. As his unmasked eyes glittered in the fire glow, a smile quirked his wrinkled lips.
“Now that you know who I am…” he began, but Cadrach interrupted him.
“We do not know you, sir, and you have mistaken us!”
The old man laughed dryly. “Oh, come. You and I may not have met before, my dear fellow, but the princess and I are old friends. As a matter of fact, she was my guest, once—long, long ago.”
“You are…Count Streáwe?” Miriamele breathed.
“Indeed,” the count nodded. His shadow loomed on the wall behind him. He leaned forward, clasping her wet hand in his velvet-sheathed claw. “Perdruin’s master. And, beginning the moment you two touched foot on the rock over which I rule, your master as well.”
3
Oath-Breaker
Later in the day of his meeting with the Herder and Huntress, when the sun was high in the sky, Simon felt strong enough to go outside and sit on the rocky porch before his cave. He wrapped a corner of his blanket about his shoulders and tucked the remainder of the heavy wool beneath him as a cushion against the mountain’s stony skin. But for the royal couch in Chidsik ub Lingit, there seemed to be nothing like a chair in all of Yiqanuc.
The herders had long since led their sheep out of the protected valleys where they slept, taking them down-mountain in search of fodder. Jiriki had told him that the spring shoots on which the animals usually fed had been all but destroyed by the clinging winter. Simon watched one of the flocks milling on a slope far below him, tiny as ants. A faint clacking sound wafted up to him, the rams butting horns as they contested for mastery of the herd. The troll women, their black-haired babies strapped to their backs in pouches of finely stitched hide, had taken up slender spears and gone out hunting, stalking marmots and other animals whose meat could help to eke out the mutton. Binabik had often said that the sheep were the Qanuc people’s true wealth, that they ate only such members of their flocks as were good for nothing else, the old and the barren.
Marmots, coneys, and o
ther such small game were not the only reason the troll women carried spears. One of the furs ostentatiously wrapped around Nunuuika had been that of a snow leopard, dagger-sharp claws still gleaming. Remembering the Huntress’ fierce eyes, Simon had little doubt that Nunuuika had brought down that prize herself.
The women were not alone in facing danger; the task of the herdsmen was just as perilous, since there were many large predators that had to be kept from the precious sheep. Binabik had once told him that the wolves and leopards, although a threat, were scarcely comparable to the huge snow bears, the biggest of them heavy as two dozen trolls. Many a Qanuc herder, Binabik had said, met a swift and unpleasant end beneath the claws and teeth of a white bear.
Simon repressed a reflexive tremor of unease at this thought. Hadn’t he stood before the dragon Igjarjuk, grander and deadlier by far than any ordinary animal?
He sat as late morning passed into afternoon, watching the life of Mintahoq as it lay spread before him, as simultaneously hectic yet organized as a beehive. The elders, their years of hunting and herding past, gossiped from porch to porch or crouched in the sun, carving bone and horn, cutting and sewing cured hide into all manner of things. Children too big to be carried off to the hunt by their mothers played games up and down the mountain under the old folks’ bemused supervision, shinnying up the slender ladders or swinging and tumbling on the swaying thong bridges, heedless of the fatal distances that stretched beneath them. Simon found it more than a little difficult to watch these dangerous amusements, but through all the long afternoon not a single troll child came to harm. Though the details were alien and unfamiliar, he could sense the order here. The measured beat of life seemed as strong and stable as the mountain itself.
That night Simon dreamed once more of the great wheel.
This time, as in a cruel parody of the passion of Usires the Son of God, Simon was bound helplessly to the wheel, a limb at each quarter of the heavy rim. It turned him not only topside-down, as Lord Usires had suffered upon the Tree, but spun him around and around in an earthless void of black sky. The stars’ bleak radiance blurred before him like the tails of comets. Something else—some shadowy, icy thing whose laugh was the empty buzzing of flies—danced just beyond his sight, mocking him.
He called out, as he often did in such terrible dreams, but no sound came forth. He struggled, but his limbs were without strength. Where was God, who the priests said saw every act? Why should He leave Simon in the grasp of such dreadful darknesses?
Something seemed to form slowly out of the pale, attenuated stars; his heart filled with awful anticipation. But what emerged from the spinning void was not the expected red-eyed horror, but a small, solemn face: the little dark-haired girl he had seen in other dreams.
She opened her mouth. The madly revolving sky seemed to slow.
She spoke his name.
It came to him as down a long corridor, and he realized he had seen her somewhere. He knew that face—but who…where…?
“Simon,” she said again, somehow clearer now. Her voice was filled with urgency. But something else was reaching out for him, too—something closer to hand. Something quite near…
He awoke.
Someone was looking for him. Simon sat up on his pallet, breathless, alert for any sound. But for the endless sighing of the mountain winds and the faint snoring of Haestan, wrapped in his heavy cloak near the coats of the evening’s fire, the cavern was still.
Jiriki was absent. Could the Sitha have called to him from outside the cave? Or was it only the residue of dream? Simon shivered and considered pulling the fur coverlet back over his head once more. His breath was a dim cloud in the ember-light.
No, somebody was waiting outside. He did not know how he knew, but he was sure: he felt tuned like a harp string, trembling. The night seemed tight-stretched.
What if someone did wait for him? Perhaps it was someone—some thing—from which it would be better to hide?
Such thoughts made little difference. He had gotten it into his head that he must go out. Now the need tugged at him, impossible to ignore.
My cheek aches terribly, anyway, he told himself. I won’t be able to fall asleep for a long while.
He snaked his breeches out from under the sleeping-cloak where they stayed warm in the bitter Yiqanuc night, wrestling them on as silently as he could, then pulled his boots onto his cold feet. He briefly debated putting on his mail shirt, but the thought of its chilly rings, rather than any surety of safety, decided him against it. He furled the cloak around him, suiting quietly past sleeping Haestan and out under the door-skin into the cold.
The stars over high Mintahoq were mercilessly clear. As Simon stared up, amazed, he felt their distance, the impossible vastness of the night sky. The moon, not quite full, hovered low over distant peaks. Bathed in its diffident light, the snow on the heights gleamed, but all else lay sunken in shadow.
Even as he turned his eyes down and took a few steps to the right, away from the cave-mouth, he was stopped short by a low growl. A strange silhouette loomed on the pathway before him, moon-brushed at the edges, black at the core. The deep rumble came again. Eyes flared green as they caught the moonlight.
Simon’s breath snagged in his throat for a moment, until he remembered.
“Qantaqa?” he said quietly.
The growl changed into a curious whine. The wolf tipped its head. “Qantaqa? Is it you?” He tried to think of some of Binabik’s trollspeech, but could summon nothing. “Are you hurt?” He silently cursed himself. He had not once thought of the wolf since he had been brought down from the dragon’s mountain, although she had been a companion—and, in a way, a friend. Selfish! he chided himself.
With Binabik imprisoned, who knew what Qantaqa had done? Her friend and master had been taken from her, just as Doctor Morgenes had been taken from Simon. The night seemed suddenly colder and emptier, full of the world’s heedless cruelty.
“Qantaqa? Are you hungry?” He took a step coward her and the wolf shied back. She growled again, but it sounded more like excitement than anger. She took a few prancing steps, the shimmer of her gray coat almost invisible, then growled again before bounding away. Simon followed her.
It occurred to him as he went, stepping carefully on the wet stone pathways, that he was doing a foolish thing. The twisting roadways of high Mintahoq were no place for a midnight walk, especially without a torch. Even the native trolls knew better: the cave-mouths were lightless and silent, the paths empty. It was as if he had wakened from one dream to enter another, this shadowy pilgrimage beneath the distant and uncaring moon.
Qantaqa seemed to know where she was going. When Simon lagged too far behind she trotted back, stopping just out of reach until he caught up, her hot breath pluming the air. As soon as he drew within an arm’s length she was off again. Thus, like a spirit of the afterworld, she led him away from the fires of his own kind.
It was only when they had walked for some time, traveling well around the curve of the mountain from the sleeping-cave, that Qantaqa bounded all the way back to Simon. She did not pull up short this time. Her great frame struck him so suddenly that even though she had merely bumped against him, he fell back onto his seat. She stood over him for a moment, her face buried in his neck, cold nose rooting ticklingly near his ear. Simon reached up to scratch her ears and felt her tremble even throughher thick fur. A moment later, as if her need for comfort had been satisfied, she leaped away again and stood whining quietly until he rose, rubbing his tailbone, and followed.
It seemed that Qantaqa had led him halfway around Mintahoq. She stood now at the edge of a great blackness, yipping in excitement. Simon walked forward cautiously, feeling the raw stone face of the mountain with his right hand as he went. Qantaqa paced in seeming impatience.
The wolf was standing at the rim of a great pit, which burrowed away from the side of the path into the very mountain. The moon, sailing low in the sky like an overloaded carrack, could only silver the stone around
the hole’s mouth. Qantaqa barked again with barely contained enthusiasm.
To Simon’s staggering surprise, a voice echoed thinly from below. “Go away, wolf! Even sleep is taken from me, Aedon curse it!” Simon threw himself to the cold gravel and crawled forward on elbows and knees, stopping at last with his head hanging over blind nothingness.
“Who’s there?” he cried. His words reverberated as though they journeyed a great distance. “Sludig?” There was a pause.
“Simon? Is that you who calls?”
“Yes! Yes, it’s me’ Qantaqa brought me! Is Binabik with you? Binabik! It’s me. Simon!”
A silent moment passed, then Sludig spoke again. Now Simon could hear the strain in the Rimmersman’s voice. “The troll will not speak. He is here, but he will not speak to me, to Jiriki when he came, to anyone.”
“Is he sick? Binabik, it’s Simon! Why don’t you answer me?”
“He is sick in his heart, I think,” Sludig said. “He looks as he always did—thinner, perhaps, but so I am, too—but he acts like one already dead.” There was a scraping noise as Sludig, or someone, moved in the depths. “Jiriki says they will kill us,” the Rimmersman said a moment later, his voice flat with resignation. “The Sitha spoke for us—not with heat or anger, as far as I could tell, but he spoke for us all the same. He said the troll people did not agree with his arguments and were determined to have their justice.” He laughed bitterly. “Some justice, to kill a man who never did them harm, and kill one of their own as well, both of whom have suffered much for the good of all folk—even the trolls. Einskaldir was right. But for this silent fellow beside me, they are all hell-wights.”
Simon sat up, holding his head in his hands. The wind blew uncaringly about the heights. Helplessness spread through him.
“Binabik!” he cried, leaning over once more. “Qantaqa waits for you! Sludig suffers at your side! No one can help if you don’t help yourself! Why won’t you speak to me?!”